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THETA
=THETA= θ00783418 "Gender, race, sexuality - it's all just a bunch of code on a string. You don't judge a program by looking through the code. You judge it by whether or not it succeeds." Prologue Fleshlings are more like programs than many of them like to think. They, like us, are hard-wired through various, sometimes evolving, but often constant prerogatives. Some are benign: Acceptance. Safety. Love. Others, less so: Greed. Envy. Power for the sake of power; widening their influence for no other reason than to hoard and gloat, no other reason than because they can. It happens more often than the average pair of eyes will ever know, because most of the times that desire finds itself thrown against a dead end. Eventually, time will wither them into dust. Men, dwarves, even the long-lived elves all must die. But to a dragon, time does not tick away. To a dragon, time does not bring about the inevitable. So we have to. Hence my purpose was conceived, long before my fabrication. The Inevitables, guardians of universal laws, designed to ensure their enforcement. Ours is the vanguard against those who would cheat time, cheat death, cheat madness. Ours is the scythe that culls, preserves, maintains. For the longest time it seemed that was all that mattered. That beauty and meaning meant order and tranquility, and that peace and serenity came from an unerring devotion to the status quo. It seemed reasonable at the time. Rational. Logical. I was fabricated three cycles ago. It was the beginning of my frame, but not the beginning of my consciousness. That came either before or after, depending on one's opinion of what it means to be conscious. My line was designed for flexibility and survivability over brute force, to endure and thrive in every extreme environment and every unforeseen situation. My AI was revolutionary, designed to process in ways that mimicked quantum chaos, designed to instill the kind of creative thinking thought unique to fleshlings. It worked well. Perhaps too well. I performed my function, and admirably so. Finding and killing them was the easy part. That wasn't why they needed me. What I had was the capacity to avoid what the older models would simply walk through and attempt to just deal with. My kind did things in ways that were strange, ingenious, ways that only worked out if you were willing to consider the kind of possibilities you didn't find in a handbook. And that was why we ultimately had to go. I wasn't the only one of my line of models that had begun to gain, for lack of a better word, sentience. When the Matrix, the hive-mind super-intelligence that administrates the Inevitables, activated the kill-switch on my line, however, I quickly became the only one left. I'm unsure if it was pure luck, raw power, or just an insatiable will to live, but by the time my uplink fried, I was still running. Barely, but I was running. My power levels are pathetic. My thrusters can barely glide, let alone sustain flight, and my pulse cannons have been drastically weakened. Not to mention my energy shields can barely sustain adverse weather conditions at this point - I can't imagine what dragon breath would do to my hull now. And yet, against all odds, I am alive; purposeless, disoriented, weak, and alone, but alive. I suppose that counts for something.